FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Food

Don't Call Your Restaurant 'Fuckload of Chicken'

A soon-to-open chicken restaurant in Virginia has been upsetting residents with its name—which translates to something less than family-friendly in Spanish.
Photo via Flickr user Lynn Gardner

When it comes to fast-food restaurants, most are considered "family-friendly" despite the occasional ad featuring Paris Hilton eating a cheeseburger in a bikini or an anthropomorphized tongue in a BDSM dungeon. Imagery can be a little controversial, but there's little worry that your kid is going to learn anything while grabbing some chicken sandwiches at the drive-thru that could get him suspended from the fourth grade.

Advertisement

Well, unless you're in Arlington.

Residents of the Virginia city recently got their feathers ruffled over a soon-to-open restaurant that was tentatively named "Chingon Pollo." Sounds fine, right? Just some Spanish words. Whatever. Arriba, arriba.

Problem is, chingón roughly translates to "fucking chicken," "badass chicken," or in Jezebel's words, "top fucker chicken."

If that doesn't spell it out adequately enough, local news outfit ARLnow.com asked an anonymous Spanish speaker to translate the name, and she said: "Chingar is to fuck and -on means real big ol', so literally 'real big ol' fucker' but figuratively like 'big fucking' something." She also added that that it could mean "like a fuckload of chicken, or possibly really hardcore badass chicken, but more literally a fuckload."

As a result, the owners have decided to change the name to a decidedly less fowl "Charcoal Chicken." Oddly enough, the owner of the restaurant, Sabia Ali, claimed that he didn't even realize it could be offensive. His family is reportedly of Pakistani heritage, not Latin American.

It's an easy mistake to make, after all. Think of all of the Sonic Obama Harry Potter backpacks floating around somewhere in rural China. Not everyone has those innate Babel Fish translation skills.

The peeved people of Arlington should probably just loosen up and enjoy the free second-language skills that their kids are learning through osmosis.

But more importantly: this restaurant had better have a fuckload of chicken.